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One of seven robocall cases sputters out

"Robbie the Friendly Robot," an Ottawa man who turned out by pure coincidence in his Halloween costume as an April Fools gag, was in character and pleasing camera clicking tourists while protesters showed up in small numbers on Parliament Hill on a rainy Sunday afternoon to bring attention to the robo-call scandal, in Ottawa on April 1, 2012. (David Kawai / Ottawa Citizen)

The Conservative Party is successfully killing one of seven legal challenges in the robocall case in federal court.

Leeanne Bielli of Toronto was one of the voters in seven ridings across Canada who filed affidavits reporting that they received calls designed to keep them from voting.

In an affidavit sworn out in April, Bielli reported receiving a robocall telling her that her polling station had moved. She did not manage to write down the address, and didn’t know who to call to get the right address.

“Because of this uncertainty, I did not vote in the election,” she wrote.

As it turns out, she didn’t know in which riding she lived.

Bielli believed she lived in Don Valley East, where Liberal Yasmin Ratsani lost to Conservative Joe Daniel, according to her affidavit. But the Conservatives eventually discovered she actually was eligible to vote in the adjacent riding of Don Valley West, where Liberal Rob Oliphant lost to Conservative John Carmichael.

A lawyer working for Conservatives checked Bielli’s name against an electronic copy of the national electors list, which is provided to candidates and parties by Elections Canada.

The list showed Bielli had been living in the adjacent riding of Don Valley West since February 2011, at least two months before the May 2 election. The information was confirmed by checking with the Ontario Ministry of Transportation, according to court documents.

Council of Canadians lawyer Steven Shrybman, who is seeking to overturn the elections, said Monday that he is going to drop the challenge in Don Valley East, given the new information.

He said that a key piece of evidence — a study based on a poll by Frank Graves — is being adjusted to remove the results from Don Valley East.

The legal challenges, backed by the left-wing advocacy group, allege that misleading pre-recorded and live calls made during the election discouraged enough non-Conservatives to change the outcome of the votes.

If the court agrees, it could order the results set aside and trigger byelections in the affected ridings.

Having one of the cases dropped is an embarrassing setback for the applicants and will be welcome news for the legal team that has been handling the case for the Conservative MPs. Lawyers for the Tories have tried to have the cases tossed out, and also moved to have the court increase the surety the applicants must provide to $260,000 from $7,000.

The court rejected both motions, and appeared to agree with Shrybman that the party was seeking to drag out the legal process, saying that the surety motion had “unnecessarily delayed and encumbered these proceedings.”

The Council of Canadians cases are separate from Elections Canada’s ongoing investigations of complaints about misleading calls. The agency has received 1,394 complaints from about 200 ridings across the country, including Guelph, where thousands of voters received the “Pierre Poutine” robocalls directing them to the wrong polling stations.

On Thursday, the Supreme Court will issue a ruling on the successful legal challenge of the election result in Etobicoke Centre, where Liberal Borys Wrzesnewskyj was defeated by Conservative Ted Optiz on election day. Wrzesnewskyj’s legal challenge was successful in May, when Justice Thomas Lederer, of the Ontario Superior Court, ruled that irregularities at the ballot box cast doubt on the process, although there was no allegation of wrongdoing — by telephone or otherwise — considered in the case.

Optiz has been in limbo since then. The top court heard Opitz’s appeal of Lederer’s ruling in a special mid-summer hearing.

Ottawa Citizen national affairs reporter covering government and politics on Parliament Hill. Specializing in data journalism and social-media evangelism. Suffering the wrath of political partisans since... read more 1998. Follow me on Twitter at @glen_mcgregor or email me at gmcgregor @ottawacitizen.com.View author's profile